Michael, a driven research scientist working on time travel theory, spends all his time in the garage ‘lab’ trying to perfect a device. Sandra, his wife, is bottom of his priority list. Only his friend and associate, James, seems to get Michael’s full attention. But which version of his friend is it, and which version of his wife? Because if Michael really has solved time travel, then these might just be future versions sent back to fix past mistakes.

A love triangle caught in the circle of time, YESTERDAY LAST YEAR is about the mistakes we make and how far we're willing to go to fix them. After making its World Premiere last month at SciFi London, this single-location brain-busting thriller makes its North American Premiere as the next screening in our Orbiter Series.

Writer/Producer/Lead Actor/Editor Adam Bradley will be in attendance and Q&A following the Wednesday, June 21 (7:30pm) screening at Flix Brewhouse. Named one of Top Ten Best at Sci-Fi-London 2017 by the British Film Institute (BFI), YESTERDAY LAST YEAR follows in the tradition of PRIMER and OWA Favorite TIME LAPSE, where the drama that unfolds from the invention of a time travel device has more to do with characters and laws of physics than stopping (or starting) some sort of geopolitical apocalypse.

“Bradley’s film gets to the core of what I love about Other Worlds Austin,” says OWA Founder and Artistic Director Bears Fonte, “this is a story that plays out in the performances and themes. The ingenuity of the indie filmmaker to do SciFi on a budget that probably couldn’t even afford a shoe string never ceases to amaze me. In fact YESTERDAY LAST YEAR might have, decades ago, been a play, although camera trickery and facial hair help us keep the timelines straight… as straight as possible under the circumstances."

YESTERDAY LAST YEAR will be making its North American Premiere with the Orbiter Year Round Screening Series. The last time OWA had such a high profile premiere was with zombie thriller DEAD WITHIN in 2014 before the first festival. With successful screenings of TELEIOS and FUTURE ’38 already this year at Flix Brewhouse, OWA Orbiter is becoming as essential as the festival to see the best SciFi from around the world.

In addition to the June North American Premiere of YESTERDAY LAST YEAR, Other Worlds Austin has announced three Texas Premieres that will screen in the Orbiter Series in July, August, and September, including Slamdance Audience Award Winner DAVE MADE A MAZE.

"I love the Orbiter Series because we get to focus on one film at a time in an intimate setting,” says Dan Repp, OWA Senior Programmer and Event Director. “We do our best to program films that are thought-provoking and inspire conversation within our community.”

Repp and OWA Artistic Director Bears Fonte saw DAVE MADE A MAZE at Slamdance and knew they had to bring it to Austin. With a production design fabricated almost entirely out of cardboard, Bill Watterson’s indie gem pushes the boundaries of the horror and fantasy genre. In it, Dave, an artist who has yet to complete anything significant in his career, builds a cardboard box fort in his living room out of pure frustration, only to wind up trapped by the fantastical pitfalls, booby traps, and critters of his own creation.

The Orbiter Series continues with the August 16th Texas Premiere of DIVERGE with Writer/Director James Morrison in attendance. In the post-apocalyptic drama, the survivor of a deadly virus is given the chance to reclaim his lost life by stopping the man responsible for the disease.

Winner of the U.S. in Progress Award as well as official selection of SCI-FI London, Boston Sci-Fi, Film Quest, and many other film festivals around the world, DIVERGE explodes time travel out of the garage and across the desolate wastelands of future and the urban war zone of a big city on the verge of its demise. It's a big budget film somehow crammed into an indie execution and was nominated for the ‘Stubbornly Independent’ Award at the Tallgrass Film Festival.

Hollywood Reporter called the film “wildly inventive…an impressively crafted feature that’s full of frequent surprises,” and Bloody Disgusting declared it “one of the most original and entertaining films in recent memory." Producer John Charles Meyer will be in attendance and will do a Q&A after the July 19th screening. DAVE MADE A MAZE will be released theatrically by Gravitas Ventures in August.

September 20th will see the Texas Premiere of ISLAND ZERO from the mother-son team of writer Tess Gerritsen and director Josh Gerritsen. In the SciFi Horror creature feature, a fishing community on a remote Maine island finds itself suddenly cut off from the rest of the world after the ferry stops coming. When people start to vanish, the terrified survivors realize that someone - or something - is hunting them.

“I am really excited about our Orbiter Series this year,” says Fonté. “Dan Repp and I have put together a program that captures the indie excitement of our festival and spread it across the whole year. Many of these films will be coming out before the festival and so it’s great to have an opportunity to bring them to the Other Worlds audience."

In YESTERDAY LAST YEAR, Michael spends all his time in the garage ‘lab’ trying to perfect a time machine. In honor of Michael’s DIY grit, (plus an added dash of inspiration from creepy Tom Waits tune “What’s He Building”) the OWA team is sharing stories of other garage creations…

By ERIC HARRELSON — I’ve been helping him since I found out. The wife isn’t happy about it.

Every evening I walked Norman, our lab mix, by that house. I heard the sounds of grinding, the rhythmic clang of metal slamming into metal, and the muffled curse of a smashed finger. A momentary pause, then the garage windows flashed blue and white along with the crackle of an arc welder. The light would stop, a compressor would kick on, and the grinding or hammering would resume. It would often continue from early evening long into the night. We all just assumed he was restoring a car, or working on a motorcycle.

You know, what single men do in their suburban garages.

I imagined a radio softly playing rockabilly music, and a man in a greasy white t shirt, sleeves cuffed, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other, surveying a torn down motorcycle frame, contemplating his next step. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

None of us had ever met the neighbor, and we all just assumed he worked at night, because there was never any activity in the house during the day. At least none that we could see. I’m sure we saw him get in his beat-up panel van and head to work, but now I can’t recall having ever laid eyes on the man. Not properly, anyway. I’m pretty sure I saw him crack open his door and sign for a load of pipes and sheet metal, but maybe I just assumed I saw it because the delivery guy came and left, and my brain filled in the blanks.

Lately, the noises started earlier and went later, pausing only for a few hours at a time. Almost daily at least one delivery man would show up, bringing materials, tools, or sometimes food. The racket was starting to get in the way of my sleep, but he was a few houses down, and the wife’s white noise machine did a pretty swell job of drowning it out.

By Taylor Covington — It seems we have hit a point of rigidity. We can’t make anything new or original without having it soaked in blood and gore. We certainly can’t make anything original AND with a diverse cast because the internet is still too young for it.

The Future Now

By Bears Fonte — Science Fiction is inherently political. Do we see our society becoming more or less like the imagined future these writers present? Do we want it to? How do we stop that (or encourage it)?

Bradbury’s The Veldt Is Happening Now And It Scares Me

By Kelsey Hockmuller — What’s almost scarier to me is how even though the idea of virtual reality is almost universally portrayed as negative in the media, we’re still trying to make it happen.